We have come through perhaps the most exciting and challenging period in our brief history as a school these past two months. We completed five full years of existence and are now well into our sixth year. We recently hosted a visit by an accreditation team whose purpose was to assess our fitness for being accredited. It required
an intense season of preparation, writing, and prayer leading up to the visit.
We are partnering with Desiring God to put on the Pastor’s Conference this coming February with a view to the conference becoming solely our responsibility by 2017.
The Bethlehem Institute has launched an online curriculum based on BCS Press curriculum, which has been taught at Bethlehem Baptist Church for many years.
Our student body has grown to nearly 200 students this fall.
With all of these developments, we are busier than ever, more dependent upon the Lord than ever, and more grateful than ever for you, our faithful partners in this remarkable endeavor. With this growth and these exciting, new initiatives, our financial needs continue to grow larger as well.
After five years, we’ve seen the amazing benefit of keeping tuition affordable. Our graduates have gone on, unencumbered by debt, to join ministries all over the world. To share our encouragement with you, we’ve decided to focus the next several prayer letters on the remarkable impact that generous giving has on individuals, churches, and on the spread of the Gospel.
Each week, one of our faculty will exegete a section of 2 Corinthians 8-9 in order to focus on what God is pleased to do through his people when they give sacrificially to the ministries the Lord places before them. It is our prayer that these glimpses of grace and gladness will focus, encourage, and bless you and all those who financially support the ministry of Bethlehem College & Seminary. We believe we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg here.
We have always coveted your prayers for us. Many of you have faithfully done so since our beginning in 2009. The Lord continues to answer your prayers. We have come a long way since our first year, and now we believe we’re on the cusp of even more exciting developments in the years to come.
May the Lord bless you as you contemplate his glorious Word and as you support this ministry. You are, indeed, co-laborers with us and the fruit of this ministry will last for generations to come. It will form an inextinguishable beacon of the light, strengthening the church worldwide and bringing the lost into the saving light of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Ever grateful for your prayers and partnership,
Tim Tomlinson
President
Prayer Requests
- We have received the preliminary report from the ABHE accreditation visit team and we have six weeks to respond to their recommendations. Please pray that we respond in a satisfactory way to this report. We’ll need to be efficient over these next few weeks!
- Please pray for several of our faculty who will participate in the Evangelical Theological Society meetings in two weeks. This is an important venue for theological discussion and debate. Pray that our faculty are wise and discerning as they interact with their colleagues from around the country.
- Please pray for a remarkable outpouring of financial gifts over these last two months of the year. We’ll need to finish November and December strong in order to put us in a good financial position, which is important to the accreditation association as well as our long-term stability.
- Pray also for a significant response to the WORLD magazine ad that we placed in the current issue.
